...It
was believed that he was shot from a fellow marine. And I wasn’t sure
about that, I was like, you know, how could that happen, nobody else was back
there, in that area, where they were sweeping through. And a lot of them were
asking, what’s the story on Guti, what’s going on, have you heard
anything? Probably one of the hardest things I had to do was lie to them and
tell them I hadn’t heard anything yet. We don’t know yet, I’ll
find out when the word comes down. So that way we could keep everybody’s
head in the game and push forward. It has to be one of the hardest things,
even harder than losing a Marine to enemy-fire. Just because we know that
it came from a fellow Marine. You know that something went wrong, there was
a lack of communication, and that it could have been avoided. That’s
the hardest thing about a Marine dying from friendly fire...

...We were told that most of the iraqi army were still up north so we were
told that Umm Qasr really wasn’t going to be too, too bad, and we weren’t
supposed gonna have anybody out there. And 5 minutes out before crossing the
border, we get the report that there’s dug-in iraqi infantry out there.
It was pretty hairraising to hear that, knowing that we were going to go right
into the fight...